Why Bother?

Looks like the new bailout bill contains tax breaks for "small business" in order to attract the votes of the House Republicans.

Hold the condescension please

I don't think Thomas Schaller's sneeringly delivered and thinly-veiled derision of Deaniacs, Obamabots, and other progressive grassroots activists is quite warranted by the facts of this particular situation:

I hate to be the wet blanket, but the electoral map continues to consolidate and contract around the same eight to 12 states that decided the last two elections. After reducing its presence in the South a few weeks ago, now comes news that Team Obama is closing its offices in North Dakota and moving troops there to Minnesota and Wisconsin.

[...]

As for all those "50-state strategy" advocates: They seem to be deafeningly silent now, don't they? It was stupid to believe in such fantasies in the first place.

I'm not sure what Schaller thinks all of us "50-state strategy advocates" mean by that phrase, but I'm fairly certain it's not "Obama will be competitive in all 50 states this year." My understanding of that phrase led me to believe that the DNC was attempting to invest in local and state level party infrastructure in order to build the Democratic Party from the bottom up. The benefits would be seen in local Democrats being elected to office and then progressing on, presumably to higher responsibilities. While this might one day manifest itself in a state shifting on the red-blue presidential spectrum, I don't think anyone expects it any time soon.

That as we approach the election the electoral focus narrows and campaigns marshal resources to compete in those pivotal areas is more a comment on the idiosyncracies of the electoral process than anything else. At any rate, the Obama campaign's electoral strategy and the DNC's 50-state strategy are two distinct operations operating in multiple electoral landscapes - they're certainly complementary, but not one and the same.

Each campaign is working on different (but again, complementary) goals and to date seem to be producing good results. Yes, the lofty rhetoric of a "governing majority" might have been a little overambitious. But the point here is to first and foremost win. If we have to win with 276 evs instead of 330, so be it. It won't be pleasant, but we'll take it - and right now the sky is not falling. The situation could potentially be even better with expanded majorities in the legislature and a raft of new Democrats coming up through the local parties.

So why the hate?

Prisonship Internal Memo to Congressional Dems

Memo to Dems: This is Leverage.

Dear Dems,

So, like many of you, I had a hard time turning away from beautiful geniuses like Jim Cramer (swoon) and (my life-pundit) Erin Burnett* as this last week came in with a "laissez-faire" Lehman collapse and went out with an AIG bailout, only to culminate in what Krugman et. al. are rightly (and ironically) referring to as "socialism" in our financial sector.

(Parenthetically, if you're wondering "what the eff does all of this mean, and who the hell can explain it to me?" you'd do well to check out: Jorge on the nuts and bolts of the housing market bubbles, CDOs and how we got here; Krugman on the meat of the Paulson proposal and how it "works" to solve even just the market-related problems at hand; Dean Baker, as usual, with a blueprint for a bailout that might improve things for actual fucking people; and, as pertains to the thrust of this memo, Bob Kuttner on what the Dems could do if they "strapped some balls on their dick," to use the colorful and masculinist phrase once overheard passing from the lips of my 9th grade history teacher.)

Anyway, Dear Dems,

I learned a lot about leverage in my former work as a union researcher. (It's an even-numbered year, so I will assume you remember what unions are.) In my old line, leverage was everything - you never knew where you'd find it, but you knew you'd know it if you saw it. Sometimes it's a matter of public record. Sometimes it's a matter of dumpster-diving. Sometimes it's a matter of building power and rope-a-doping your opponent into revealing her own weaknesses, then building more power in the light of that self-diagnosis, then winning.

This time's one of those times. I've studied and studied and crapped myself thinkin' on the meaning of leverage, its rhythms and habitats and metamorphoses....but I've rarely seen it show itself so plainly. Democrats, you hold a lot of power in your hands this week. And knowing you as I do, I expect nothing less than a warm-hearted, polite and ineffectual surrender.

Does "taking one for the team" always have to be synonymous with losing? Before your very eyes, not just the sitting GOP but the very legacy of Reaganism has shown its "less government in business, more business in government" ass to be a social disease, in need of an unprecedented dose of welfare. While it's understandable (to me, anyway) that our Democratic nominee for president affects something like moderation- and makes all the bullshit bipartisan calls for pragmatism of which it will be the job of people like me and the OGs to disabuse him in January - your job is to make sure that socialism does not come to Wall Street without strings.

There should be more government in business. Now is the time to trim away any compensation for the shareholders and executives we're bailing out, and to erect a wall between houses of finance and government agencies where now there's a revolving-door. For god's sake"White-collar" crimes can be as violent as any other...violent-er, even, when one in seven of our damn bridges are unsound and all our dimes are spread across Iraq and the inter-ether of Over the Counter markets. (fwiw - I will regret not living to see an Attorney General Edwards "assume the position" and enact the purge that gets us to pre-post-neoliberalism.)

There should be less business in government. The idea that, having purchased these "toxic" assets for a sum of $700 billion, we will parcel them out in $50 billion slabs and have currently functioning private financial houses resell them is obscene, insane, incestuous, and it repeats the lie of Reaganism. BHO spoke eloquently of a need to "make government cool again," a neat phrase that in many ways evokes the political and cultural stakes involved in the massive, necessary political project of undoing a 30-year ass-kicking of the many by the few. Our purpose is not served by outdoing the GOP at treating citizens like shareholders. Our purpose is served only by showing that government can and should function within a democratic polity as an agent of (downward) redistribution, and that Democratic government's version of redistribution is a lot more inclusive and a lot less violent than the alternative.

Anywho, summing up:

1. Good News! This week you have the chance to undo all of your past sins. You can work off the debt accrued by your failure to stop an evil, imperialist war by declaring the end of finance capitalism as we know it.
   
2. Bad News! We both know you'll be doing no such thing.
   
3. Don't worry, I'll probably end up voting for all y'all anyway. See you on the teevee!
   

(footnote: * Yeah, it'd seem that my MSNBC addiction is giving way to a CNBC fetish - can you blame me, with a duo like this as the Kiki Dee and Elton John/Gram and Emmylou/Thalia Zedek and Chris Brokaw for my shut-in vie de brain-diharrea?)

What happened to good drug etiquette?

Thanks to the NYT, I spent the evening familiarizing myself with the whole genre of Salvia trip YouTube videos (as an added bonus, it's also the first time I recall having seen the word "bong" appear in the Times). Back in my younger and wilder days, I was no stranger to all manner of psychedelics, and to be perfectly honest, I enjoyed them. Salvia, however, was my least favorite - I tried it once and had the worst experience of my life. It wasn't a good time. Some people enjoy it, and that's fine by me, but it's definitely not my cup of ('shroom) tea.

Watching the videos, though, made me realize we were downright civilized in our little adventures. A few thoughts:

• Tim Leary always talked about "set and setting" in having a good trip. We always managed to either be outside in a safe environment, at a show or club, or some comfy place to chill out. Watching these jokers get blasted in their dingy apartments doesn't seem like a lot of fun to me.
• You know what sucks when you're tripping? People pointing and laughing, and some jerk trying to "trip you out" with some sort of nonsense. People, just let the person enjoy their voyage.
• You know what would've sucked even more? Someone waving a camera in my face and documenting my trip.
• And really, posting it on YouTube? I don't care if the shit's legal, broadcasting to the world how fucked up you were is one of the stupidest uses of technology I've seen.

Take the advice from someone who's "been there," kids - turn off the camera, light up a doob, put on Dark Side of the Moon, and just relax. It's much easier on your constitution.

< /cranky old man >

Oh, fuck it. This one's pretty fucking funny.

But before I go

A note to the political commentariat: can we please dispense with the term "flip-flop?" It was grating in 2004. It now makes me want to slit my wrists.

That is all.

Another Sort of "Difficult Transition"

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Summer of the MILF

Is this the rollout of the 2008 "key electoral constituency"? Because I've gotta tell ya, if Chris Matthews starts analyzing how the critical cougar vote is going to break, I'm. Done.

Please don't

I get the feeling I'm going to be writing a bunch of these.

Dear Bay Area local color pundit guy (h/t),

A substantial portion of the U.S. population - including, I imagine, a surprisingly significant number in your readership - is going to be coming to grips with the possibility of casting a presidential ballot for a black man. Many will struggle with the decision solely on the basis of race, and some may manage to break through their previously comfortable ways of thinking. It's a significant challenge for Senator Obama to overcome. That's why no one needs to know about this:

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

Did we learn nothing from Dennis Kucinich? We love Kucinich! We love it when he offers us red meat. We love his stands on the issues. We love his wife. But he's a vegan who hangs with Shirley MacLaine, so watch out.

With that in mind - do we really want to present Obama as some sort of New Age crystal healer?

Please don't

Dear "liberal big-time pundit",

I tell this tale, of course, not merely to remind us that the better world of which Robert Kennedy so movingly spoke died aborning 40 years ago in Los Angeles. I also tell it because I see a dynamic similar to that between the Kennedy and McCarthy campaigns in the relationship between Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's equally historic campaigns, and because today's Democrats have been given a chance -- as they were not in 1968 -- to come together and make the kinds of changes they have only dreamed of over the past four decades.

I'm begging you - please don't make this presidential election about 1968. I say this as a person who stands on the shoulders of that generation and who shares many of their ideals. Seriously, though. Just. Don't.

I know it's tempting. Every election in which I've ever participated (dating back to 1992) has been about the 1960s. Draft dodging, dope smoking, bra burning... yup, we've had to rehash it all. "The Sixties generation is in power!" "We're going to smash the Sixties once and for all!" Now we have a presumptive candidate who (on a lesser historical note) is post-Boomer, who witnessed that decade not as a participant, but as a child.

And you want to start making comparisons back to the Sixties, exactly the turf that the GOP wants us to tread. You don't think they've been stockpiling all that shit on Bill Ayers for nothing, do you?

I'm not saying that there aren't important lessons to be learned from that time, and I'm certainly not implying that we've moved past the big problems that so piqued the consciences of that generation. But we must stop framing our political discourse as a running feud about what went right and wrong in the 1960s.